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School shootings

This is a follow-up to my previous post on the recent Nursing School shooting, where I look at school shootings in more depth. It is in school shootings where sex-biases will show up, more than any other type of mass shootings/killings. For example, in rampage or sniper shootings, it can be just a matter of who is around at the time, and the shooter’s objective is generally to shoot as many people as possible before being shot himself or being caught.

I started with a list of school shootings from the list of notable school shootings from the Wikipedia page. I used the USA, Canada and Europe lists, excluding South America, Asia and Australia list due to difficulty in getting enough data to analyse (there were no Australian school shootings on the list). I next excluded a number of political/faith motivated attacks which are more acts of (group) terrorism rather than traditional school (or spree) shootings.

Initially I was only going to use those shootings with five or more fatalities, but decided to broaden this to three or more fatalities. The final selection and collated data resulted in the following – click here to be taken to a full-sized image in a new tab (you may still need to click on the magnifying glass icon to get to full size in Firefox).

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The Shooters

Unlike mainstream media, I will not glorify or give further notoriety the perpetrators in this post, identifying them only by sex and age. Firstly the basics – sex, race and age of the perpetrators:

Sex of the shooter is fairly much a no-brainer – female spree/school shooters are rare, and the one entry here is only because I lowered the level to three fatalities.

Race of the shooter – there is a nearly 80% chance that the perpetrator will be white.

Age group – broadly speaking, there is about a one-third representation for teens, twenties, and 30-52.

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Institutional Targets

The actual number of institutions targeted in this study is 30 (total for High Schools, 12) but for two of the high school shootings there were two perpetrators. I used the number of perpetrators for the main piechart to relate to the segments which are further cross-referenced with the age range of the perpetrator/s.

In Primary School shootings the perpetrators are either 20s, or in the 30+ age groups.

In High School shootings, the perpetrators are overwhelmingly students or former students of the schools.

In University shootings, perpetrators are again from the 20s or 30+ age brackets, and include students, staff and outsiders.

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The Victims

Unfortunately with many of the shootings, a full breakdown of occupation, sex, age was not available for injuries, but was available for the fatalities.

The following tables and charts are for fatalities by occupation, and occupation and sex:

Students account overwhelmingly for the greatest number of fatalities, and female students are twice as likely as male students to be fatalities – the greatest number of all. There are slightly more male staff members than female staff members, although a number of factors can influence this depending on institution. For example, at the Primary level, most teachers and staff are female. It is roughly equal in High Schools, but frequently a higher number of male staff at the University level. Some specialist schools (two nursing schools are included) where the majority of staff and students are female. The ‘other’ male victims is almost twice as high as the female ‘other’ victims, however, many of these ‘other’ persons are either police or killed in the getaway (eg carjacking).

In looking at victims by sex, both fatalities and injuries:

This gives a dramatically different picture between Canada & Europe versus the United States (roughly equal). I believe the reason for this is due to America’s availability of guns coupled with high levels of gun crime as a result. Therefore many shootings with just a few victims would only make local and not national news – so the aim for many of the US perpetrators is for a high body count to obtain media notoriety, even posthumously. I have always maintained that the media focus on naming (and analysing) the perpetrator only leads to more similar mass shooting sprees. The perpetrators should remain the nameless losers that they really are.

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Misogyny in specific shootings

The most infamous of misogyny in school shootings was the 1989 École Polytechnique Massacre. Within a 20 minute shooting (and stabbing) spree, the 25yo male had murdered 14 women, injured ten women and four men. In a suicide note he blamed feminists for ruining his life, and included a list of nineteen Quebec women he considered feminists and wished to kill. In the first shooting of the day he separated the nine women from the fifty men, and lined up the women. Shortly before shooting the women (killing six, injuring three) he had said “You’re women, you’re going to be engineers. You’re all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists.” He went on to shoot another 19 people, primarily females, before shooting himself.

In the 2006 Amish School shooting, the 32yo white gunman specifically targeted females. Instructing the hostages that if the two women who had made a break for it to get help got away, he would shoot everybody. He later released all the boys, holding ten female students – killing five and injuring five, then shooting himself. All the victims were girls aged between 6-13 years old.

The 2009 Winnenden school shooting in Germany was a spree over three locations, a high school, carjacking getaway, then an industrial estate. At the first location, in two classrooms at the school, the 17yo shooter had shot most victims in the head (showing calculated targets, not spraying the area with bullets), he killed one female teacher, eight female students and one male student. The other fatalities at the school were all female trainee teachers in their 20s. The male fatalities were primarily ‘getaway’ fatalities, and by the final location had changed to random shootings, including at police. During his getaway when asked why he had done it he replied “For fun, because it is fun.” He ended it by shooting himself.

The 22yo shooter at the Kauhajoki School of Hospitality in Finland left behind two notes indicating that his motive was “I hate the human race”, but of the ten fatalities, eight were female students ( plus one male student, one male teacher). As with Winnenden, the first victims were deliberately picked out and shot. The shooter eventually committed suicide.

The Oikos University shooting last week in California by a former 43yo student resulted in six female students murdered, three others injured. The only male killed during the event was the driver of the car carjacked during the shooter’s getaway. Whilst it is reported that the primary target was a female administrator, the shooter also wanted revenge against female students for “disrespecting him”.

Suspected misogyny in school shootings

Although not proven to have a misogynistic component, the following shooting are highly suspicious that most of the victims were female, particularly girls:

A 43yo former scout master (with suspicion of inappropriate behaviour towards the boys) opened fire in Dunblane Primary School in Scotland in 1996. Although going for maximum carnage (indicating a certain degree of randomness) the majority of the fatalities were female students. Eleven girls, five boys, and one female teacher were the fatalities, as well as thirteen others injured. Basically two thirds of the victims were female. The shooter committed suicide.

In 1913, the Bremen school shooting resulted with five girls dead. The 29yo gunman first opened fire on a classroom of about 65 girls at St Mary’s Catholic School. At that period of time it was convention in many places to have sex-segregated classes, the gunman chose to open fire on a classroom of girls.

In 1997, a 14yo teenaged gunman opened fire on a group of praying students at Heath High School. The three dead were female students, of the injured three were girls and two boys. Mental illness probably played a part, and the perpetrator was sentenced to life with a possibility of parole in 25 years (2023).

Two of the youngest school shooters in this list, aged 11 and 13 at the time, staged an ambush style shooting at the Westside Middle School. One of them pulled the fire alarm, and as the building was being evacuated they opened fire, killing five female students and one female teacher (unknown who the injured were). Both were incarcerated until they were 21, and both have since been released (2005, 2007).

The 1966 University of Texas shooting was done by a 25yo former marine. The incident was more of a sniper spree shooting rather than a traditional school shooting. However, on the night prior to the shooting the gunman he knocked his mother unconscious then stabbed her in the heart (killing her) then returned home and stabbed his wife in her sleep (killing her). He went on to kill another 13 people at random, as well as the unborn child of one pregnant woman wounded in the shooting. The shooter was shot dead by police.

The above list of ten shootings accounts for one-third of the school shootings.

The 2002 Enfurt Massacre was discounted, even though about two thirds of the victims were female. The 19yo expelled student gunman was targeting teachers, methodically moving from classroom to classroom, opening the door and shooting the teacher. The two students killed were shot through a locked door, and a policeman was also killed. Nine female and four male teachers were killed, one female and one male student, one police officer.

The 1989 Cleveland School massacre is unclear if girls were the primary targets. Of the five children killed, four were girls. Twenty-nine other children were injured. However the attack appeared to be racially motivated. The 24yo gunman committed suicide.

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Males as targets

In a few of the shootings males were the majority of victims.

In 1976 at the California State University Fullerton, a 37yo paranoid schizophrenic targeted co-workers at the university library, the majority of victims (6 males, 1 female killed, 2 males injured) were male. This was primarily a workplace shooting that happened to take place at a university.

In 1991 at the University of Iowa a 28yo former graduate was angry at not being awarded a physics prize. The four professors shot were male (not surprising in the male-dominated field of physics), and the female grievance officer was also short and killed. The gunman then committed suicide. This was primarily a targeted revenge shooting, rather than a spree shooting.

In 1996 at San Diego State University a 32yo mechanical engineering graduate student shot three of his professors at a meeting regarding his thesis (the three students were uninjured). The perpetrator remains incarcerated without the possibility of parole. This was also a targeted revenge shooting, with specific targets.

In 2010 at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, the only female shooter in the list, shot six members of staff during a faculty meeting. The shooter was a 44yo biology professor who had been denied tenure the previous year. The shooting was more systematic, going around the table, and the result was two male staff and one female staff members dead, two male staff and one female staff injured. The shooter was arrested, and possibly faces the death penalty. This is primarily a workplace shooting.

The 1992 Concordia University massacre in Canada, a 52yo associate professor, killed four male engineering department professors, and the female department secretary. The shooter was also denied tenure. This was primarily a workplace shooting with specific targets. The perpetrator is eligible for parole in 2017.

When males are the majority of targets, the motivation is usually revenge against specific targets (and usually those in authority). Also three of the five cases here are workplace shootings rather than traditional school shootings.

The only school shooting with revenge against the teachers, where all three of the dead were female professors, was the University of Arizona shooting in 2002. This was the University’s Nursing School, a female-dominated area. The shooter, a student, had been barred from sitting a midterm exam. After shooting the three professors, he then shot himself.

Whilst there are, out of the 30 shootings, five cases that are clearly misogyny, with a further five of strongly suspected misogyny – the comparison of the five cases where males were the majority of victims does not correspond as ‘misandry’, but as specific revenge usually against specific individuals. In the misogyny cases, female students are most likely to be the victims. If some of the ‘high body count’ US shootings were set aside, then a trend towards more female victims would be evident.

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Mental illness and SSRIs

There are some medical professionals and others pointing the finger at the class of drugs known as SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, drugs like Prozac) as a cause of the increase in school shootings and other violent incidents. After cross-referencing the above list, it would be folly to try to attribute SSRIs as the sole cause of school shootings, for example the underlying mental illness could not be fully ruled out as a contributing factor. The SSRIs may serve as a trigger to the event.

Mental health problems prior to shootings were evident in about six cases, and some anti-social or problematic behaviour towards peers in about three or four other cases. Overall, counting SSRIs, mental health and behaviour problems accounted for less than half of the shootings. Nor are they all ‘strange loners’, the University of Illinois shooter was described as “a very good academic record, no record of trouble.” The Kauhajoki school shooter was described as “He was happy, a social guy – there was nothing exceptional – and he got along with people well and he was not lonely. He had friends.” Although these two were cases that mentioned SSRIs.

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Other factors

The media, all types, is a significant contributing factor. For some, particularly the teenaged boys (to young adult males), infamy and notoriety are strong motivations, and the news media feeds this by plastering their names and photos everywhere. Sites such as Wikipedia and murderer fascination/fan sites also dedicate many paragraphs or pages to the full life story of these killers. As one shooter said (and others have said similar) “One day, I want everyone to know my name and I want to be famous”. I have proven with this blog post, it is actually possible to write about the shootings and not give these shooters what they crave, that they can remain nameless anti-social losers who can be forgotten and dismissed. Their victims rarely get the column inches and coverage that the perpetrators do.

Other types of media can contribute long term in the lead up to these crimes. An endless supply of violent film and television through to violent video games, the latter sometimes obsessively played by shooters and the average teenaged boy or young adult male.

Gun availability is a factor, and the main reason why the USA seems to be the world capital in mass shootings as well as high levels of individual gun crime. The high levels of gun crime generally is most likely the reason why some of the US shooters aim for a high body count, to gain the fame for the crime, because the shooting of just a handful of people in the US generally only makes the local news.

Either fascination with, or a past in the military features in a significant minority of the shootings.

Specific revenge targets, with collateral victims, also feature in a minority of the shootings – these tend to be fatalities less than five. Specific revenge is the key factor when the number of male fatalities or victims is higher, otherwise in high body count shootings a roughly equal female/male ratio results.

A significant number of the shootings show or evidence misogyny as the main factor, more than any other. Female victims tend to be innocents (as in there is generally no personal involvement with the shooter), and it seems that ‘any female’ is deemed a suitable replacement for any specific female or females in general. The two most shocking facts to arise from the above study is that female students are twice as likely to be killed than male students, and also the high numbers of primary-aged girls being targeted (by mature males generally aged 30-50).

School shootings differ from sniper/spree shootings in that as well as being soft targets, security is low, and victims are grouped together in a confined space such as a classroom. Even so, with some of the shootings, the shooters specifically picked out victims from the group.

The most outstanding elements of this study – the shooter is likely to male, and white – anywhere from eleven to 52 years old. Female students are twice as likely to be killed in a shooting than male students. Misogyny as motive or evidenced factors in a significant number of school shootings.

What an excellent piece of work! Seeing all the facts broken down like this, clearly highlights the motive of misogyny; that reports on these incidences always try so hard to obscure. I love your pie charts!

wow, thanks for your hard work. So how did you find out the sex of the victims? Because the news articles hardly every mention it anymore. And if somebody is relying on wiki to list the victims, that frat-boy club will stop as soon as people start noticing which sex is disproportionately targeted.

You must have put in a lot of work on this. It’s very informative. Sometimes something smacks me upside the head and reminds me why I’m a radical feminist. This just did that to me. (Painful but necessary.) Thank you.

Many thanks for this excellent comprehensive analysis of systemic lethal male violence continuing to be committed against women and girls because they are females. It is vital claims women who commit lethal violence against males are ‘misandric crimes’ by having factual evidence available which proves when women murder individual men they do so because they are seeking revenge against a specific individual and are not committing violence against men because they hate men!

The same cannot be said for those males who target women and girls because they are female not male.

I whole heartedly agree grouping these male misogynists together ensures their craving for ‘fame’ is not enacted, because there is nothing ‘deviant’ about these males, rather they are all normal males who committed monstrous crimes against women and girls. Kudos to the feminist who created this phrase because it is aptly debunks claims such males are ‘monsters.’

So how did you find out the sex of the victims? Because the news articles hardly every mention it anymore.

On the Dikipedia of the specific shootings, most of the time the victims are listed, fatalities at least – it is much harder to get lists of the wounded, hence the analysis for the wounded could not always be done. Sometimes the list of fatalities were not on the Diki page, or very sketchy/incomplete info, so I had to go hunting around old newspaper articles. With foreign language names it was sometimes difficult to know the sex of the victim, for example in one of the German shootings, I worked off the photo of the memorial plaque to determine the sex of the victim (in German they have the masc/fem of different occupations, eg Lehrer/Lehrerin).

I started with the Dikipedia list on school shootings, excluded the political groups (some of which included setting fires etc) because they have a different agenda, and usually method, and were not that relevant to school shootings. I started by compiling the information into the table (shame I could not get enough info on the injured most times) and in completing the table, it gave the sex breakdown of victims, occupations, age (and sex!) of shooter etc. Then I made the basic pie charts of that data. I tell you, I too was personally shocked when I saw female students as the largest group of victims, and twice as likely as male student victims. As for the sex of the shooters, no real surprise there (yawnfest). And the age range for shooters was also an interesting discovery, as well as the distribution of age ranges. Anyway, I spent at least three days just doing the research, before making the charts. And some things like the misogyny became more evident if you read how the shooting unfolded, the first victims particularly, and how some of the male tally only came about during a getaway – whereas if you only looked at the number of females/males as an end total, it may not have been that evident.

With some shootings, at the time they happened it was obvious that misogyny was the prime motive (Amish School Shooting, École Polytechnique), but looking at shootings over several decades gives an even clearer picture that misogyny is at play quite often, it is a strong pattern.

OT – what the heck has WP done to the comment box again, almost impossible to do long comments.

Can’t tell if the list at SSRI Stories and Yolande Lucire was useful to you. I think they had Sex of the victims, although their reckoning is looking at who and how many of the shooters were taking antidepressants and antipsychotics, which are said to cause violence and suicide ideation.

I was going to put a notation for SSRIs mentioned on the table, but that sucker was getting way out of control, so opted out. But visually, when you look at it, the SSRIs are not playing a major part in the mass-shootings. I may consider just adding a supplementary table for the SSRIs, perhaps prior mental health – but not all data is necessarily available to me, as well as a tendency for post-event write-ups in papers/Dikipedia to automatically label any mass shooter as “lone looney, must be insane” kind of thing. To a degree, it is a little beyond the scope of this study, because of lack of privileged data (that law enforcement would have, but me, a lowly squirrel, doesn’t have).

Anyway, in viewing the table with the SSRIs, it was clear that they fell into a minority, even if a significant minority – SSRIs were not clearly a major cause of school/mass shootings. What also concerned me a little about the SSRI site was that both being on SSRIs and withdrawals from SSRIs were lumped in together. This is very much an expert turf area, because who is to say how much or little the underlying initial problem was a key factor, for example, paranoid schizophrenics do some strange things on or off meds. Decades ago I knew a PS who had all his teeth removed because he was convinced aliens had put transmitters in his teeth. Not sure what meds he was on, or how reliably he took them, but it was pre-prozac. He also had moments of clarity too, where he knew this stuff was batshitunsane.

Yet another mass shooting targeting females again. Six young women dead. The dude was an MRA. The sex of the injured have not been mentioned, but it is assumed they will be mainly young women too (the link to the wiki page included at the end)

The three other victims were all girls, one of whom died on the spot and two of whom died in hospital over the past two weeks.

Yes, three girls and his cousin. (One boy has survived, with serious facial injuries)

The usual bullshit “reasons” were given in earlier reports, particularly distasteful was that “he was bullied”.

Local media said Jaylen Fryberg played on the school football team and had been named a homecoming prince just a week before.

Far more like BMOC than ‘poor bullied boy who lashed out’.

The reason, although reports vary, was being rejected or dumped by a girl (I believe one of the fatalities). Some reports said girlfriend broke up with him, others said it was a girl he fancied that continued to reject him.

USA Today has a post, loaded with stats, on ‘spree killings’ (which is broader than school shootings, and also, method of homicide is broader than this post). They also used the criteria of ‘four or more’, rather than the three that I used here.

End result—that 94% of mass killings were committed by males, roughly aligning with the 97% above.

(Ammoland.com) Nearly every mass shooting incident in the last twenty years, and multiple other instances of suicide and isolated shootings all share one thing in common, and its not the weapons used.

The overwhelming evidence points to the signal largest common factor in all of these incidents is the fact that all of the perpetrators were either actively taking powerful psychotropic drugs or had been at some point in the immediate past before they committed their crimes.

Multiple credible scientific studies going back more then a decade, as well as internal documents from certain pharmaceutical companies that suppressed the information show that SSRI drugs ( Selective Serotonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors ) have well known, but unreported side effects, including but not limited to suicide and other violent behavior. One need only Google relevant key words or phrases to see for themselves. http://www.ssristories.com is one popular site that has documented over 4500 ” Mainstream Media ” reported cases from around the World of aberrant or violent behavior by those taking these powerful drugs.

Actually, I did look into SSRIs at the time of writing—and although present in a FEW of the cases, definitely NOT in the majority. Certainly NOT all.

There is one piece of logic you overlook, and that is, if it is SSRIs, then the sex and race of the shooters would reflect the population demographic. But it does not, nowhere near it. 79% white males.

Repeat: 79% White Male.

And 97% MALE.

Please do not come to this blog to excuse-away male violence. It is male socialisation, male entitlement, patriarchy that is responsible, with females usually bearing the brunt of most of it.

ETA: You probably think you are clever, coming here, with something you think I overlooked. I had not overlooked it, I discounted it. Big difference.